Last day of work for 2 weeks! Woohoo! Not to sound too
mysterious, but I was able to do something for someone that
is rated as a Master and is responsible for a lot of help
in what I do. I ain't gonna say what that "something" is
but I think the mystery person knows who he is. Suffice to
say that it gave all of us a great deal of pleasure to do
this.

Thanks to that mystery person who is also rated as a Master
in these prestigious settings for all the help with
ThinkPads, desktops, servers, and everything.

Minimal Notes on the Work Thing-

On the workside, I think there will be a lot of interest in
some of the things we are into now. The real news will have
to wait a bit longer but its very cool and I think people
will find it challenging, interesting, and provocative.

Hey ianmacd ! Yeah, the IPAQ
stuff is rather expensive. I ended up buying a dual pcmcia
sleeve so I could run a 1g microdrive and a orinoco wireless
card at the same time. The sound system on the IPAQ with
headphone engaged is truly remarkable. The pre5 release
seems to be working quite well for me these days. The
microdrive is mounted as /dev/hda1 and it has a few hundred
mb of mp3s on it. The power does drain rather fast but the
sleeve does have an extra battery. One thing I have noticed
is that the IPAQ will drain the battery down if a wireless
card is left in it. The new 38xx models sound totally
cool! I read on one of the mailing lists off
handhelds that there
would be an official announcement about running familiar on
the new ones. They have gorgeous screens and also have an
SD slot built in. They are expensive toys though and the
new one is no exception from some of the pocketpc sites I
visit.

Today I got to play almost three hours of Loki's Alpha
Centauri. Very nice exploration game. Beautiful graphics
and nice AI to play against. One of my favorites. I really
like the simulation games like SimCity and also some of the
shooters.

Nice to see Fridays come here. I've been tracking a lot
of
the new packages in the Familiar Linux pre5 release lately
and things are looking very interesting there. There is a
nice new package management tool for ipkg called pikpaq I
believe and the dillo web browser is looking really good.
Check out
handhelds.org for
more details.

I ended up spending a lot of hours on a rather critical
task
and just when I thought I had it finished up, ended up
having to stay up to recompile X from CVS sources. Painful
and long compile.

There have been a lot of interesting stories on slashdot
lately. I usually read /. only about once a week and I
found myself checking it out quite a bit more frequently
with some of the recent stories there.

I have not been able to do one thing I wanted. I really
wanted to start playing a lot of the Loki games i have
loaded on one of my systems and I just did not have the
time. Anyways, also wanted to say "hello" to
ianmacd. Hope things are
going well for you!

Somewhat of an update; but could not resist. Hey
paci! Welcome back. Welcome to
Prosa and to its guiding principles. I wish you all the
very best of luck and good fortune! Perhaps catch up with
some of the folks on OPN sometime. I see a few there on
occasion.

Interesting day today at work. Spent the day working on a
variety of pieces of hardware and getting Linux to run on
them. A few of them are very cool but news of it has to
wait.

At a personal level, I have been hacking around on my IPAQ
running Familiar Linux prelease 5 and its looking a bit
better even though at times it has some issues. Now the
dual sleeve works so I can mount a bunch of mp3s on a
microdrive and be networked at the same time. One small
buglet is that it does not do suspend right yet. I upgraded
the ROM in my IPAQ to 32mb and the RAM is at 64mb.
Interesting that CE can see the additional 16 but cannot use
it. Not even under PocketPC 2002 when it comes out. Linux
sees it and I can write to it immediately. Its interesting
that the dual sleeve works now and when things stabilize a
bit I can get intimate linux installed on the microdrive.

Have not posted a diary entry for awhile due to world events
and interesting times at work. Events at both locales
happen so quickly that I feel unable to keep up.

Well, work was really fun today! Thanks
hacker for the help! Also got
to continue playing with a bunch of new hardware which is
pretty cool but cannot speak of it quite yet.

Play

Play is good also! One needs play. One also needs to drink
good beer which often makes play that much better. It
appears that the fine folks at handhelds.org will be
releasing Familiar 0.5 quite soon and it includes support
for dual pcmcia sleeves for the IPAQ and a new kernel. Too
cool! I really enjoy playing with Linux running on the
IPAQ. dsifry, check out the
wiki at handhelds.org
for some additional details and more info like what we were
talking about.

Other stuff

I've read a lot of the articles and diary entires about "the
event". Suffice to say, I have a different take on things;
but not one I will bore anyone with. After a few years in
the active duty military, I perhaps see things in a
different light. I mourn though with the families and
friends and country that has lost so many good people to a
group that leaves me in a state of pretty much total
disgust. As one little snippet in the bible says, "he that
troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind". 'Nough
said.

Riding BART to San Francisco was rather nice. Seeing the
skyline, feeling the cool breeze. There is a day after
yesterday. Back to work now on some new stuff awaiting
me. Sometimes I define work and other times, to my
pleasure and delight, work defines me, consumes me, allows
me to get forgotten in hardware and Linux distributions.

Its a time to re-energize, top off the tanks, get involved
in yet more interesting projects.

The photographs and news reminds of other events in my
life and the memories seem to flow by with no stop. I
remember the fall of Saigon in 1975 while I was stationed in
Japan. The sight of the last helicopter lifting the last
person was one I thought would never leave me. The
Oaklahoma city bombings way after my tour of duty was over
in the military left me feeling rather vulnerable. Now
this. I was back in NY and went on a boat tour with a bunch
of Linuxcare people in February; all 'round Manhattan. The
weather was so crisp and cold. I dug the photos out I
took. There it was; the twin tours of the WTC standing
there. Not to stand any longer though. Surely, our
beliefs, our philosophies, our goals and thoughts change
too. Should we strike back? Should anyone be allowed to do
this in the name of their belief system to us?

I just ask because I am asking the same questions today
all through the day. My son asked me, "why would someone
hurt us like this?" I looked at him and remembered the
carnage that has been inflicted over the years and it seems
a lot of it has been based on religion. What does one say
to a 10-year old watching his very first catastrophe? There
is no paradigm, no belief system to offer. Something went
down today which we all will think about, wonder about, and
deal with.

Even our 10 year olds.

Nothing more to report, I am sorry to say. As Paul
Harvey was fond to remark, "now you know the rest of the
story". I remember hearing the words that President
Roosevelt uttered..." a day which shall live in infamy".
This is surely one of those days. Now with the miracle of
modern TV, we can see it instantly and our children can see
what a wonderful, but dangerous world they shall inherit.

Hi dsifry and
paci! Nice to see you both.
Paci, the information you posted not so long ago about Prosa
sounds very exciting and challenging! Congrats!
dsifry, way to go!

Some very interesting turns of events lately at work;
but time always will tell these things, so no speculation
from me. Worked for awhile today on getting pretty new
video cards like the ATI M6 working. Challenging and fun.
It can be done, just takes a bit of work.

I also have been working a bit on some new documentation
efforts for our LBT project that we gave away at the LWE. I
have some plans to change my little participation a bit to
allow better use of the companion tool part of things.

Finally, Intimate on the IPAQ could be said to Rock! I
installed this evening on a compaq IPAQ and started using
apt-get to get new packages. I could see that the disk
(even a 1g microdrive) could fill up rather quick. What
with doom and stuff :) dsifry, you must give this a try!

Pretty interesting day today. Beginning of the new NFL
Season and a lot of changes in the technology space
happening. The HP and Compaq thing seems very interesting.
I have never been with a large company that did this but a
smaller one I was once with (not Linuxcare :) ), took 3
months to just sort out all the operational issues.

I spent the day playing with my IPAQ running Familiar LInux
and the QPE environment. Pretty nifty stuff. There are
so many different distributions and looks one can get to.
One of the ones I want to try this next week is Intimate
Linux running on a IBM Microdrive. You can still boot
Familiar Linux but you get a gig to place with! And you
can "apt-get" the packages. You can even go to unstable.

At the recent Linux world show we showcased a IPAQ running
QPE 1.31 and gave it away at the end. Everyone that saw it
seemed pretty positively impressed. I have read a lot of
accounts about this year's LWE. Some say "better"; some say
"smaller". Others different things. It seemed to me that a
few of the usual vendors pulled out and left the show kind
of different so to speak.

A little birdie told me that this should be a very
interesting week :)